Pustular Diseases

Abstract

One unusual feature of the skin is its tendency to form sterile pustules. Nondermatologists have often been taught to equate pus with infection and find the nonchalance of dermatologists’ approach to pus puzzling. While many bacterial, viral, and fungal infections in the skin are indeed pustular, there are also many patients who present with sterile pustules. The prototypical pustular disease is psoriasis. Presumably, a number of noninfectious triggers can also produce the appropriate cytokines for eliciting a pustular response in the skin. In this chapter, we will discuss the idiopathic pustular diseases, dividing them as shown in Table 16.1 into acral and generalized conditions while also distinguishing between the childhood and adult forms.